Lawmaker wants to designate a state gun ...

[spin]

December 7th, 2010 @ 6:00pm
By ksl.com

SALT LAKE CITY -- Soldiers used it in both World Wars and gun enthusiasts say it has defended American values, but does that mean the Browning 1911 handgun, designed by Ogden native John Browning, deserves a spot as Utah's state firearm? The idea is getting mixed reviews.



The Browning 1911 would be in the same class as the seagull, the state bird; the Sego Lily, the state flower; and the Dutch oven, the state cooking pot. The question some have is whether a state gun is somehow different.

Steve Gunn, with the Gun Violence Prevention Center, said, "I would prefer that if we adopt a firearm as our symbol, that we use something more modern like a .50 caliber sniper rifle or perhaps an assault rifle."

It's a sarcastic response to the idea of a state firearm from a man concerned about gun violence. Rep. Carl Wimmer, (R) Herriman,is serious about elevating this historic, semi-automatic .45 caliber handgun, though.

"This is not an implementation of death, this is an implementation of freedom. This is the firearm that helped win World War II, that helped win World War I and defend American values," Wimmer said.
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=13561290&autostart=y

[GreenStormCloud]

1. For Texas that should be the Walker Colt.

It was designed by Sam Walker, a former Texas Ranger, and used by them during the Mexican-American war in 1846. The orders for this gun saved Colt from bankruptcy and established the name of Colt as a maker quality combat handguns.

[spin]

4. The Walker Colt was indeed a great handgun ...

I've heard that it was the most powerful handgun made until the .44 magnum came along. I've also heard that it was almost as dangerous to be behind the Walker Colt as in front of it. They tended to blow up as metallurgy wasn't as advanced in those days.

It would make a fine State Gun for Texas.

[oneshooter]

10. Indeed it would make a fine State Gun for Texas....

However that is a 1860 Fluted cylinder Army 44 cal,cut for a detachable shoulder stock in your picture. About 1/2 the size of a 4lb Walker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Colt

Oneshooter
Armed and Livin in Texas

[MedicalAdmin]

2. "this is an implementation of freedom. This is the firearm that helped win World War II"

What a load of shit.

Soldiers helped win WW2 etc. More revisionist history in order to get donations for some asshat of a politician.

[spin]

5. True, but soldiers who were armed with firearms ...

and the common handgun for the U.S. military at that time was the 1911.

The M1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, and recoil-operated handgun chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge.<1> John M. Browning designed the firearm which was the standard-issue side arm for the United States armed forces from 1911 to 1985. The M1911 is still carried by some U.S. forces. It was widely used in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Its formal designation as of 1940 was Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911 for the original Model of 1911 or Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911A1 for the M1911A1, adopted in 1924. The designation changed to Pistol, Caliber .45, Automatic, M1911A1 in the Vietnam era.<1> In total, the United States procured around 2.7 million M1911 and M1911A1 pistols in military contracts during its service life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_Colt_pistol

[MedicalAdmin]

12. Oh right - silly me - WW1 and 2 were won because yanks had handguns.

WTF was I thinking. It's so obvious.

Puhlease.

[spin]

16. Of course not. However the handgun the U. S. military used was the Colt 1911 A1.

And why would the Utah politician nominate it as a state gun?

Because the developer of the 1911 was John Browning who was a native of Ogden, Utah and because it is one of the all time famous firearms. It served the U.S. in WWI, WWII, the Korean conflict and Vietnam. The 1911 Colt 45 and the FN's Browning High-Power Model P-35 in 9mm Parabellum were the two most famous firearms he designed. In the United States almost everybody knows of the reputation of the 1911 Colt .45. Many shooters own and use and even carry Colt 45 autos and many competitive shooter use this firearm in NRA Bullseye competitions.

The politician is not saying that the 1911 Colt .45 won any wars. He is just saying that this very famous pistol should be recognized as the state gun of Utah.

[Euromutt]

25. I'd dispute naming the Hi-Power as one of Browning's two most famous firearms

For starters, the Hi-Power was really designed by Dieudonné Saive, albeit based on a concept by Browning. Also, I think you're selling short some of Browning's other designs, particularly the M2 family of machine guns, along with the M1919A4, and to a lesser extent the M1918 BAR and M1917.

Not that the Hi-Power isn't a lovely pistol (as Massad Ayoob put it, Browning and Saive gave it superb ergonomics before the term "ergonomics" had even been invented), but I think the M2 has seen far more widespread use, and made more of an impact.

Maybe Utah could adopt the M2HB as its state firearm?

[SteveM]

36. Actually, most soldiers were equipped with something more powerful...

the M-1 Garand, a semi-automatic rifle in .30-06. While other armies were using bolt-actions, the U.S. forces were using semi-autos in a caliber at least as powerful as that of Axis foes'.

I'm kind of neutral on the notion of a "state gun." Being from Florida, and the son of pre-Civil War Crackers, I'm not sure what would constitute a Florida "state gun." Perhaps a punt, though I hope not.

[oneshooter]

11. You are right, It should be WW1 AND WW2 as the pistol was adopted in 1911. n/t

[krispos42]

23. It remains one of the best-selling guns of all time, too.

I read a couple of gun magazines. The variations are impressive, as are the prices and numbers of manufacturers. The gun makers sell virtually every one they make. A no-frills one runs for $500, a midline model goes for about $1100, and I've seen ones that retail for $3000 new.

John Browning's design is now a century old and we're still using it. Police SWAT teams often carry 1911's, for example, and the military was using them up until a few years ago. Professional competative shooters typically use them to win shooting matches (they *love* that trigger), and lots of people carry compact and/or alloy-framed 1911's as their concealed-carry gun. Plus, of course, guns kept at home for self-defense

John Browning made lots of nifty stuff that's still being used, such as the lever-action rifles orignally made by Winchester. And of course, he was a Morman from Utah.

[Euromutt]

26. "Helped win" does not equal "won"

I would dispute that "soldiers helped win WW2 etc."; I would say "soldiers won WW2 etc." but, among many things, the M1911 did help them to win those wars.

Compare the Italians. In WWII, Italian infantry small arms were, with the exception of the Beretta M1934 pistol and MAB 38A SMG, utter garbage. It's an old meme that Italian soldiers are cowards to a man (all the jokes told about the French in recent years used to be told about the Italians), but frankly, nobody could put up a decent fight with the crap the Fascist regime issued to--or should I say, inflicted upon--Italian soldiers. The Breda M37 machine gun deserves special mention as an example of how not to design a machine gun. It fed from 20-round strips, which restricted firepower. For reasons never adequately explained, the gun's mechanism reinserted spent cases into the strip, making it more time-consuming to reload them with live rounds. But most notably, the M37's lack of a camming mechanism meant that spent cases were not readily extracted from the chamber, so the gun was fitted with a system to spray oil onto each cartridge as it was fed into the gun, so that it would easily slide out of the chamber. But oil tends to attract dust, grit, sand, etc. and in field conditions (especially in frickin' North Africa) the gun would be rapidly jammed by a sludge of dust-saturated gun oil.

But I digress. Back to the M1911.

The M1911's advantage over its counterparts in the service of other armies was that it fired the .45 ACP round--a manstopper even in FMJ form--at a practical rate unachievable with a revolver. This made it very, very useful in close quarters combat, where are rifle might be too difficult to bring to bear, and might not be capable of producing sufficient firepower. A WWI "Doughboy" jumping into a German trench was far better off drawing his M1911 than relying on his long, bolt-action M1903 rifle. During WWII, the M1911A1 remained popular for clearing enemy trenches and bunkers, as it continued to do in Vietnam.

And even though other semi-auto handguns chambered for .45 ACP have come along since, the 1911 design remains popular. It is by no means a perfect design--in particular the extractor and the plunger tube (above the left grip) are prone to breakage, and if the bushing (at the muzzle end) breaks, your recoil spring and barrel will likely go flying toward the target--but while it may require more maintenance, it is basically accurate, ergonomic, generally user-friendly, and lends itself readily to customization.

[one-eyed fat man]

35. Where are its contemporaries?

Anyone using a C-96, P-08 or a 1912 Steyr as a daily carry gun?

This is my 1911. It left Hartford in 1913 and was initially shipped to a cavalry troop in Arizona. Rebuilt by the Army at Rock Island before it was sold as surplus in 1961 through the DCM. It went with me to Viet Nam twice, Germany three times, and I only quit taking it overseas when Army regulations changed. I'd still stake my life on it!



I silver soldered the front blade in place in 1961, other than that I've replaced the mainspring twice, the recoil spring number of times, and thrown away a bunch of worn out magazines. There are no 97 year old Sigs or Glocks gracing anyone's duty holster.

[spin]

37. I knew an individual was was a Vietnam "Tunnel Rat" ...

armed with a !911 Colt .45, a Ka-Bar knife and a flashlight these incredibly brave soldiers would explore the tunnels of the Viet Cong.

Hard to find a better pistol or knife.

I didn't realize how inferior the Italian small arms were. I knew of the terrible reputation of the Japanese Nambu.

A crude but serviceable weapon, it was considered the best Japanese sidearm of the World War II era. However, given the generally poor quality of Japanese side arms of this period, that is a small honor. It was very inferior to the American Colt M1911, the British Webley revolver and the German Walther P38 and was crude even compared to the Russian Tokarev TT-33.

It was seriously flawed, both in construction, and the ammunition it used. The pistol utilized a weak 8 mm cartridge, which was considerably less powerful than comparable Western rounds like the .45 ACP, the 7.62x25mm Tokarev, the .455 Webley, and the 9x19mm Parabellum. The safety catch was completely useless, and the magazine springs were weak often resulting in jams. On the positive side, the Nambu was accurate, and the low recoil of the 8 mm round helped improve that accuracy.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nambu_pistol

[Bonhomme Richard]

3. Maybe it ought to be the FN 1900 which was the first,...

semi automatic (.32) that Browning designed. I have one and it's a nice little pistol.

[spin]

17. True, but the FN 1900 lacks the fame of the 1911 Colt 45. (n/t)

[TreasonousBastard]

6. The have a state COOKING POT???!!! Well, why not...

have a state gun, then.

(If they didn't have a state cooking pot, I would think this is a really stupid idea.)

[lawodevolution]

7. Steve Gunn sounds like an idiot

"Steve Gunn, with the Gun Violence Prevention Center, said, "I would prefer that if we adopt a firearm as our symbol, that we use something more modern like a .50 caliber sniper rifle or perhaps an assault rifle.""

Is this guy 5 years old?

[spin]

8. For Kentucky it would have to be the Kentucky Rifle ,,,

[slackmaster]

9. The AR-15 rifle was designed and developed mainly in California

Oh, the irony.

[Xela]

13. Would hate to see...

...who ends up with the Velo-Dog revolver.

Xela

[jazzhound]

14. Don't know why it took so long, but I fired a 1911 for

the first time at the range today. (Rented one of the Springfield models)

Sweet! Now I want one but can't afford it. Perhaps I can work out a swap of sorts with my low-mileage FN Hi-Power .40 cal.

Far as the OP goes..........why not? If nothing else the move confronts the dishonest demonization of firearms.

[DonP]

15. Well, if it's JM Browning you want to honor, the 1911 is certainly iconic but ...

... you gotta think about making the "state gun" Ma Deuce .50 Cal.

It has the same storied history as the 1911 and is still out there cranking on Humvees and other vehicle mounts.

When it absolutely, positively needs to be disintegrated right now, call for Ma Deuce.

[spin]

18. Browning's 50 Cal has had a proud history in the military ...

but the Colt 1911 is also famous for its civilian history. I own and shoot three. No pistol I have ever owned fits my hand better and the accuracy of all three is impressive.

I don't own a 50 cal machine gun nor do I have any reason to.



I just learned that the M2 .50 Browning has a history as a sniper weapon.

M2 as a sniper rifle

The M2 machine gun has also been used as a long-range sniper rifle, when equipped with a telescopic sight. Soldiers during the Korean War used scoped M2s in the role of a sniper rifle, but the practice was most notably used by US Marine Corps sniper Carlos Hathcock during the Vietnam War. Using an Unertl telescopic sight and a mounting bracket of his own design, Hathcock could quickly convert the M2 into a sniper rifle, using the traversing-and-elevating (T&E) mechanism attached to the tripod to assist in aiming at stationary targets. When firing semi-automatically, Hathcock accurately hit man-size targets beyond 2000 yards—twice the range of a standard-caliber sniper rifle of the time (a .30-06 Winchester Model 70). In fact, Hathcock set the record for the longest confirmed kill at 2,250 m (2,460 yd), a record which stood until 2002.<41><42>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning_machine_gun

[Lasher]

19. Hey why not, and she turns 100 years old next year.

I've got one of those in my gun safe. Qualified expert with one in the Army in 1970.

[bluedigger]

20. He needs a stronger rationale.

"This is the firearm that helped win World War II, that helped win World War I and defend American values."

If you throw in Korea and Vietnam, the Browning 1911's record would be more like 2-1-1...

[PavePusher]

21. Technically, we didn't "loose" Vietnam.

We never really were in it to "win", and lost the political will to do so.

[bluedigger]

22. Technically, the commies won.

Didn't they?:shrug:

I believe we were on the other side, although you could make the argument we quit before it was over...

Would you prefer 2-0-1 and a DNF?

[PavePusher]

24. Oh, I don't disagree that it was a T.K.O. win for the communists.

But we weren't actually defeated militarily.

I'd agree to either a "loss" w/ disclaimer, or the DNF.

[Euromutt]

29. You can win all the battles and still lose the war

I agree the United States wasn't defeated militarily in Vietnam, but it was most assuredly defeated politically. It failed to prevent the DRV from destroying the RVN as a geopolitical entity and incorporating the RVN's territory.

Militarily, the U.S. actually came very, very close to forcing the DRV to throw in the towel in 1969-1970, but because MACV had been predicting imminent victory for several years, only to have predictions that "Charlie is no longer able to mount or sustain a meaningful offensive" proved false by the offensives of 1968 (Tet, "Mini-Tet" in May, and the August offensive), nobody was prepared to listen anymore by 1969, and understandably so.

But none of this reflects on the combat performance of the M1911A1, of course.

[one-eyed fat man]

33. Col. Harry Summers, Jr.

"You know you never beat us on the battlefield," told his North Vietnamese Army (NVA) counterpart, Colonel Tu, during a meeting in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

That the Vietnam War was one of the most complex wars in our history was little understood at the time, and it is even less understood today. Many still believe, for example, that the war was lost to black-pajama-clad VC guerrillas, armed only with primitive weapons and revolutionary fervor.

Their attitudes evidently fixed in the early 1960s, when the VC were at their height, such critics fail to appreciate–as the North Vietnamese now freely admit–that the VC guerrillas were virtually annihilated during their abortive 1968 Tet Offensive, and from that time on the war was primarily an North Vietnamese regular army affair. It was a NVA 22-division, cross-border blitzkrieg, supported by tanks, missiles and heavy artillery–not VC guerrillas–that finally overwhelmed South Vietnam in the spring of 1975.

Vietnam was a defeat for American foreign policy and for its political goals of containing Communist expansion and maintaining a free and independent South Vietnam. And it was a defeat for the ill-conceived plans and strategies of the Pentagon's senior military and civilian leaders.

It proved to the world that all it takes to defeat the United States is patience. The failure of political will almost half a century ago will haunt us for generations. It gives hope to our enemies and undermines the faith our allies have in US assurances "we are in it for the long haul."

The 1975 North Vietnamese spring offensive, which finally conquered South Vietnam, did not defeat the American military for the simple reason that by that time there was no American military there to defeat. Not only had American forces been withdrawn years earlier, Congress had categorically and unequivocally prohibited their intervention.

Hamid Karzai and Nouri al-Maliki would be well-advised to ask Nguyen Van Thieu just what America's word is worth.

[oneshooter]

27. We didn't "win" in Korea either. Legally the Korean Conflict is still active.

There is a negotiated cease fire in effect, not a peace treaty.

Oneshooter
Armed and Livin in Texas

[Euromutt]

28. I'd count Korea as more of a "win" than a "draw"

Though, admittedly, that depends what you consider the objectives to have been.

Clearly, North Korea's objective was to capture South Korea and reunite the peninsula under communist--or rather, "Kimunist"--rule. They failed to achieve that, ergo, they lost. The UN Security Council, under Resolution 83, authorized such military assistance to South Korea "as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area." In the narrowest reading, this objective was achieved in that the status quo ante was restored, and North Korea achieved no territorial gains at the South's expense, nor is it ever likely to; ergo, a win.

One might argue that a "win" required nothing short of "regime change" in Pyongyang and extending the RoK's territory to all of Korea, but with the Soviet Union and the PRC dead-set on stopping that from happening, achieving that objective might have required World War III. Sometimes, you have to be content with stopping the other guy from getting what he wants.

[Glassunion]

30. For New Jersey...

[oneshooter]

31. Too dangerous looking!!! n/t

[Glassunion]

32. They "May-Issue" it as their state gun.

They need to make sure that only the rich or politically connected can get their hands on it. AND... You are limited in how much water it is allowed to hold, what kind of water you can put in it, and you must keep it locked up, and unloaded at all times.

[Remmah2]

34. Those elected officials have way too much time on their hands.

Way too much time.